This morning there is a
note from the surgeon of the hospital, announcing his death, and likewise
the dangerous state of his shipmate whom I saw on the pallet beside him.
Sea-captains call a dress-coat a "claw-hammer."
November 22d.--I went on board the ship William Lapscott, lying in the
river, yesterday, to take depositions in reference to a homicide
committed in New York. I sat on a sofa in the cabin, and Mr. Wilding at
a table, with his writing-materials before him, and the crew were
summoned, one by one,--rough, piratical-looking fellows, contrasting
strongly with the gewgaw cabin in which I received them. There is no
such finery on land as in the cabin of one of these ships in the
Liverpool trade, finished off with a complete panelling of rosewood,
mahogany, and bird's-eye maple, polished and varnished, and gilded along
the cornices and the edges of the panels. It is all a piece of elaborate
cabinet-work; and one does not altogether see why it should be given to
the gales, and the salt-sea atmosphere, to be tossed upon the waves, and
occupied by a rude shipmaster in his dreadnaught clothes, when the
fairest lady in the land has no such boudoir. A telltale compass hung
beneath the skylight, and a clock was fastened near it, and ticked
loudly. A stewardess, with the aspect of a woman at home, went in and
out of the cabin, about her domestic calls. Through the cabin door (it
being a house on deck) I could see the arrangement of the ship.
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